Online and off the air

The experience of watching television involves coincidence and overlap. In the same night's schedule, high art alternates with soft porn, football with war, Lionel Blair with Tony. Viewers are even handed a device that encourages them to cut and mix between these conflicting pictures. It was off-screen, though, that television, in the middle of this week, threw up a hugely significant conjunction between two streams of history, the old and the new. Soon after the BBC announced the cancellation of Top of the Pops after 42 years, Channel 4 revealed that, from next Tuesday, viewers would be able to watch live transmissions online.

Although other broadcasters have experimented with one-off simulcasts - or special editions for downloading - this is the first time that British TV will be viewable without a television set as a matter of course. And, while the almost simultaneous collapse of the pop pickers' top programme is coincidental, the events are connected.

Top of the Pops represents a kind of box-in-the-corner broadcasting that is, in the show's own terminology, a sinker; Channel 4's initiative is a riser, a new entry, number one with a bullet - a preview of a future in which TV will be found on a variety of screens, in homes, offices and pockets, and on wrists.

It's this multiplicity of transmission that has finished Top of the Pops. When Jimmy Savile launched the programme in January 1964 there were only two channels in Britain.

The medium itself remained a novelty, and pop music even more so; it's remarkable to remember that, after you'd heard a record on the radio, Top of the Pops was often the first opportunity to see what a band looked like. Born in a broadcasting market of rationing - with shortages of both channels and celebrity appearances - the programme has been destroyed by an economy of plenty. First pop videos and then pop channels competed to show bands in the flesh, until Top of the Pops became not only the last place fans would see them but the last place they wanted to.

This multi-channel, multi-platform culture in which consumers have ever-greater choice over when and where they watch has driven Channel 4's decision to allow viewing on computers. But the Federation of Small Businesses has already warned that productivity will fall if workers are able to watch Noel Edmonds on Deal or No Deal on the same screen on which they are supposed to be doing the July orders. What the federation and other employment bodies fear is a sort of absenteeism at work, a permanent version of the industrial difficulty that arises during World Cups.

For TV historians, such objections have an intriguing echo. When daytime TV was first introduced in America, senators raised worries that the programmes might "distract housewives" from their duties. The broadcasters were required to guarantee that the material shown would be of lower quality and interest than that provided in the evenings. This obligation has largely been maintained in America and Britain to this day, even though the cause is now artistic instinct rather than government insistence.

The point, though, is that television has frequently been used as some form of social control. In the past, broadcasters quietly agreed not to screen programmes appealing to young children after 6pm in order to prevent disruption of bedtime, and daytime TV became a serious business in Britain in the 1980s when high unemployment resulted in audiences worth having, although that was an accidental rather than deliberate result of government policies.

Yet all of these developments came from a system in which broadcasters were in control. Online television is further evidence of a structure in which power has passed from the producer to the consumer. This has potentially serious implications for the BBC, which has historically depended not only on choosing what was viewed but also on licensing the box on which it was seen.

The logical sequel to Channel 4's online schedule is programmes on demand, and indeed the whole progression in television over the past 40 years has been away from a culture of delayed gratification towards one of instant availability.

Top of the Pops belongs to a time when young viewers "couldn't wait" for Thursday to come around, but knew that they had to. Increasingly, those who can't wait for TV programmes won't have to. Accordingly, the TOTP of the future will be a programme - or, more likely, a network - that puts videos of bands online as soon as their songs are released. However, a further concern for the traditional television industry is that bands will have no real need of broadcasters and will simply offer the pictures for downloading from their own sites.

Now then, now then, Jimmy Savile liked to say. But the show he started has stopped because it was more then than now.